Looking for Earth-like planets outside the solar system? Bill Borucki's cheap little spacecraft can help you find a few hundred, fast.

By Oliver Morton

Lenox Laser is a highly focused specialty engineering company, the
self-proclaimed leader in small-hole technology. If you want small holes
punched through something, Lenox, based in Glen Arm, Maryland, is
the place to go. The company's Web site is awash with air slits, conflats
(don't ask), calibrated gaskets, orifices both standard and customized,
luers (see conflats), filters, and all that is holey. If the people at
Lenox don't already make what you want, they'll be happy to do a custom
job - they're quite proud of having drilled a hole through FDR's eye on
a dime as a publicity stunt. But they've rarely heard anything as strange
as a 1999 request
from NASA's Ames Research Center for a stainless steel plate, pierced by
a precisely described but seemingly random array of 1,600 holes, some
as small as three-thousandths of a millimeter, or 3 microns, in diameter.
A man named Bill Borucki wanted Lenox to make him a starry sky. A little
one, to practice with.

For Borucki, the Lenox Laser contract was just one in an endless stream
of tasks necessary to get Kepler, the project he champions, off the CAD/CAM
desk and into orbit. So far, all these efforts have been in vain. Again
and again, Borucki has proposed his Kepler mission to NASA's higher-ups.
Again and again, he has been turned down. And each time he's been turned
down, Borucki has gone away, improved his proposal, and come right back
for another try. He does this because he is convinced that his spacecraft
is capable of the first great astronomical discovery of the 21st century:
Kepler represents the easiest way to find Earth-like planets
in Earth-like orbits around other stars.

At first sight, you'd expect this to be an easy deal to close. The first
planets around stars other than our own were discovered in the mid-'90s;
since then, the study of such "extrasolar" planets has become one of the
hottest fields in astronomy. Finding Earth-like extrasolar planets - which
would be much smaller than the ones already discovered, and farther from
the stars they orbit - has become one of NASA's clearest long-term goals.
Dan Goldin, NASA's administrator, has waxed lyrical on the subject. "Shouldn't
we set our sights on finding out whether there is a nurturing environment
beyond our solar system?" he asked an audience at the American Geophysical
Union's spring meeting in 1994. "Perhaps, just perhaps, the next generation's
legacy will be an image of a planet 30 light-years from Earth."

You could argue that NASA owes the world such an image to dream
on, having effectively quashed earlier dreams of nurturing environments
closer to home. Missions have now visited the four rocky inner planets,
the asteroids that lie beyond them, the gas giants even farther out, and
the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune, farther out still. Only anomalous little
Pluto, on the fringes, remains to be seen. (See "Beyond Cool," Wired
9.04, page 116.) And spacecraft have revealed all these places to be
profoundly unnurturing. While life elsewhere in this solar system
- deep beneath the Martian surface, perhaps, or in the ice-locked ocean
wrapped around Jupiter's moon, Europa - is not ruled out, it is going to
be hard to get to.
If you have to drill for it, don't expect results until the 2010s at the
earliest, with the '20s or '30s more likely.

If finding life nearby is hard, so too is looking for Earth-like planets
around other stars. Producing actual images, as Goldin suggested, is far
beyond current capabilities. Researchers using the two established methods
of planet hunting never even see the planets involved; they simply infer
their presence from planets' effects on their parent stars. And these methods
work only for large planets; to actually detect light from a small planet
like Earth will require space-based telescopes far more sophisticated than
the current generation. A set of four space telescopes, all larger than
the Hubble, might do the trick; so might a single telescope with a mirror
11 times bigger than the Hubble's and considerably smoother. A Terrestrial
Planet Finder (TPF), using some such technology, is the centerpiece of
NASA's long-term astronomy plans - but don't expect to see it fly in less
than 10 years, and count on a bill well over a billion dollars.

Compared with all this, Borucki's Kepler is almost too
good to be true.
Its technology is mostly developed. Its design is simple. It could fly
within five years of getting the go-ahead. It is budgeted at just $299
million, which puts it in the same price range as the cheapest successful
missions to other planets. And Borucki and his colleagues claim that by
using Kepler to look
at huge numbers of stars for years at a time and carefully sifting through
the terabytes of data thus produced, they can deliver evidence of Earth-like
planets - not just a few, but a few hundred.

Still, Borucki has had to fight two parallel battles. He's had to come
up with a design for a spacecraft with unique capabilities, and
he's had to convince his colleagues and superiors the design can
work. "People in the community said it couldn't be done," says Borucki,
"and that was very effective at stopping us for a long time." But success
on the first front has slowly led to success on the second. He has convinced
his bosses at the Ames Research Center. He has convinced the engineers
at the spacecraft maker Ball Aerospace, who have become his partners. He
has sold the idea to more and more fellow scientists. One of them is Alan
Boss, an expert on extrasolar planets at the Carnegie Institution of
Washington,
who has now joined Kepler's scientific team. "We want to make sure that
the objects Terrestrial Planet Finder is going to be looking for - namely,
terrestrial planets - really are out there," says Boss. "We need a sort
of sanity check. So something like Kepler is really important.
The time has come for it to go forward."

Most crucially, Borucki has made inroads at NASA headquarters. At the end
of 2000, after three previous proposals had been turned away, Borucki's
quiet, reasonable approach and his team's attention to detail finally got
Kepler onto a shortlist for NASA's next planetary exploration. That's a
great achievement. But the list has three missions on it, and only one
will get funded: The odds are still less than even.

So why has Borucki kept trying? I asked him once as we chatted in his office
in the Ames Space Science Building.

His eyes found the floor as I posed the question; he sighed. Then he quickly
looked up, and it was as though the man in front of me had come truly into
focus for the first time. His voice was no louder than before, but his
eyes were locked on mine, and he spoke with a sincerity of the sort that
in most lives is reserved for declarations of love. "I know for a fact
it will work. I have known that for over a decade. It's a matter of will."

Designed to stare steadily at 100,000 stars and sift through the terabytes of data produced, Kepler could fly within five years. Borucki: "I know for a fact it will work."

Bill Borucki is not an imposing man; you'd overlook him in a crowd. He
speaks quietly, and when he's excited it shows mostly in pace rather than
volume. He's balding, and the hair on each side of his head often sticks
up like that of Dilbert's boss. Even with so little in the way of raw
material,
though, Borucki still manages to keep this hair in a distracted-scientist
sort of disarray. During one conversation, I got the unnerving impression
that one side of his head had just been licked by a cow.

Borucki came to NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View,
California, just north of San Jose, in the early '60s; it was his first
job after getting his MS at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He started
off working on the design for the Apollo heat shield, which involved using
the center's spectacular gas guns to accelerate samples of heat-shield
material up to orbital speeds, then catching them to see the effects. Later,
he worked on the heat shields for spacecraft returning from Mars - a much
harder problem, he says, because they would come in at much higher speeds:
"It turned out that if we had a heat shield, and then we made the structure
of the spacecraft out of the same material, and then we made the couches
the astronauts were sitting on out of heat shield, and then we made the
astronauts out of heat shield, we could get an astronaut's nose about
two-thirds
of the way through the atmosphere before it burned up." Heat shields, he
assures me, have improved since then.

Ames is an interdisciplinary sort of place, so after heat shields Borucki
went on to study atmospheres, both those around other planets and the one
above Earth. He studied the effects of supersonic aircraft on the ozone
layer. And at much the same time, in the late '70s, he became interested
in the work of a colleague, David Black.

Black had started his own career looking at the remnants of the solar system's
formation found in meteorites. But he soon decided that studying a single
planetary system was not good science; to understand planetary systems,
how they form, what they are made of, and so on, you needed a bigger sample.
So at Ames, Black ran workshops on looking for planetary systems elsewhere
- planetary systems being born in disks of gas and dust, and mature planetary
systems already neatly arranged.

Seeing planets around other stars, however, is inherently difficult:
Planets are dim, stars are bright, and seeing dim things next to bright ones
is hard. Various techniques for overcoming this problem had been studied
by ambitious astronomers before Black. The two most promising involved
watching the star, not the planet. Stars with big planets are like hammer
throwers who never release the hammer: The large hammer thrower moves in
a small circle to balance the small hammer moving in a large circle. Very
precise measurements of a star's velocity (which can be calculated from
the spectrum of its light) might show this tiny, planet-induced circling
moving the star toward us and then away; very precise measurements of the
star's position in the sky might reveal the same effect making it swing
from side to side. It is the first method - radial velocity - that has
led to the discovery of 50 or so Jupiter-sized planets from ground-based
observatories during the past five years. Unfortunately, there's a limit
to the velocities this method can detect. It will never be able to see
the minuscule motions caused by Earth-sized worlds swinging round a star.

The second method - precision astrometry, which reveals a star's movements
from side to side - requires taking measurements of a star's position with
an accuracy that today's Earth-based systems can't achieve. The expensive
and extremely complicated Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) that NASA
has on its books for launch in 2006 should be precise enough in its astrometry
to pick up the effects of planets a bit smaller than those seen with the
radial velocity method, but it won't be able to see the effects of planets
as small as Earth unless they move in very particular orbits around very
nearby stars.

The main alternative Black saw to these indirect approaches was direct
imaging: Build a telescope big enough to gather a detectable amount of
light from the planet, and at the same time find a way to block out the
light from the star. This is the option that, over time, has developed
into the planned TPF. But there was another alternative, what you might
call a semidirect method: transit photometry. Black talked about it with
Borucki, and Borucki became interested. By the mid-'80s Borucki was writing
papers on it. By the late '80s he was designing spacecraft to use the
technique and trying it out on Earth.

A transit is the passage of a planet's shadow across Earth. To astronomers
in the 17th and 18th centuries, transits of Venus and Mercury across the
face of the Sun were vital to measurements of the solar system's size.
(It was to observe a transit of Venus that Captain Cook made the first
of his voyages to the South Pacific.) The transits Borucki is interested
in, though, occur when a planet orbiting another star moves between that
star and Earth, casting its shadow across an earthly (or space-based)
telescope.
Such a transit will dim the star's light for about 10 hours. Photometry
measures this dimming, thereby detecting the presence of a planet. Stars
get a touch brighter and a touch dimmer all the time, but unlike most such
variations, a transit will repeat itself almost exactly the next time the
planet comes round the star, in a rhythm set by the planet's "year." These
rhythmical dimmings are what Kepler's photometry is designed
to pick out.

There are three problems with this method. The first is a matter of time.
Because transits last only 10 hours every year or so, to pick them up you
have to watch a star continuously, hour by hour. (For radial velocity and
precision astrometry searches, you can take data on a much more relaxed
schedule, because the movements you watch are continuous.)

The second problem is a matter of geometry. Imagine looking at the Sun
from a random viewpoint a hundred light-years away. From most viewpoints
you will never see a transit of Earth, because you, Earth, and the Sun
will never lie in a straight line. Only if your viewpoint is in the same
plane as Earth's orbit will Earth's shadow ever fall across your eye. The
chances of that are a bit less than 200 to 1. The odds of our seeing an
Earth-like planet's transits of any other star are similarly slim.

The third problem is one of photometric sensitivity. Even if you're in
the right place to see it, a planetary transit will cut a star's brightness
by only
a smidgen; looking at the Sun, you would find that Earth's passage across
its face dimmed it by only about 1 part in 12,000. That's a small effect:
Light passing through clear window-glass is dimmed 300 times that much.

Kepler's design is a response to these three problems.
The answer to the time question is simple but radical. Rather than turning
from star to star, as other telescopes do, Kepler will
stare unblinkingly at a single patch of sky
for four years, gathering photometric data on the stars in this area almost
continuously. This would be impossible for an earthbound telescope, because
Earth's rotation means that stars rise and set. But for a space-based
telescope
it's easy. The Hubble needs complicated, fallible gyroscopes and
all sorts of guidance systems to point itself at all the different galaxies
its users want to observe. Once Kepler is pointed at the
right bit of sky, it can simply be left alone; falling freely around the
Sun, it will point in the same direction for thousands of years. The
Kepler
design thus ends up with only a handful of moving parts: a couple of very
small momentum wheels to keep the solar cells pointing at the Sun, and
a mechanism that keeps its antenna pointed at Earth.

The geometry problem is solved with numbers. The telescope at Kepler's
heart is specifically designed for a wide field of view. Though its mirror
is less than half the size of the Hubble's, it is configured to see much
more of the sky. "The Hubble's field of view is the size of a grain of sand
between your fingers at arm's length," says Borucki. "Ours is the size
of your open hand at arm's length." Pointed in the right direction - the
team has chosen an area in the constellation Cygnus - Kepler
can watch stars by the hundreds of thousands. The telescope will project
their images onto a set of charge-coupled devices, the technology used
in digital cameras. Astronomical CCDS - semiconductor detectors that
astronomers
use to turn the photons of starlight into electrons that can be processed
digitally - are particularly large and sensitive examples of the craft.

In the first year of operation, Kepler's CCDs will monitor
about 170,000
of the stars in its field of view; after that, they will concentrate on
100,000 particularly Sun-like stars that have shown themselves to shine
with a pleasingly steady light. With that many targets, 1-in-200 odds of
spotting
a planet are pretty acceptable: The Kepler team expects to see from 50
to 650 Earth-like planets, enough to provide statistics about which sorts
of stars produce earths and which don't. Sometimes it will see more than
one planet in a system: If it were looking at our Sun
from far away and seeing transits of Earth, for example, it might see transits
of Venus as well. Mercury and Mars would be missed because they are small;
the outer planets would be missed because they take more than five years
to go around the Sun, so a five-year mission wouldn't see the regular pattern
of their transits.

A telescope that, if studying our own solar system, would pick up at best
two planets out of nine is clearly not perfect. But as exploration of our
own solar system has shown, some planets are more interesting than others.
What makes Earth interesting - and what allows us to be here taking an
interest in it - is that it sits in the Sun's habitable zone, a ring where
the warmth the star gives off is great enough to allow water on the surface
of a planet with an atmosphere, but not strong enough to boil it. By looking
around stars like ours for planets with orbits of about a year, Kepler
would seek out planets in the stars' habitable zones. It would search for
the most interesting ones of all: planets where there might be creatures
like us.

In 1992, Borucki presented Kepler's predecessor design,
called Fresip
(Frequency of Earth-Sized Inner Planets), for possible inclusion in NASA's
plans. In 1993, he took the Fresip design to a meeting of NASA's Toward
Other Planetary Systems Science Working Group. By something less than
a coincidence, the meeting was chaired by David Black, who had first brought
transits to Borucki's attention; Black has been pursuing avenues
to extrasolar planets ever since his time at Ames. But the connection didn't
help. The working group already had proposals for various space telescopes
capable of precision astrometry, including the one that would evolve into
SIM. Fresip, a new idea, got nowhere.

Borucki's next attempt to get to space was through NASA's Discovery program
for small planetary spacecraft. Discovery spacecraft are chosen through
a wide-ranging competition. A scientist - the principal investigator, orPI
- puts together a team, which includes one of NASA's research centers and
an industrial partner, and proposes a mission. The proposals are judged
on scientific merit and technical readiness; the most promising are put
on a shortlist and given some money to conduct feasibility studies. Six
months later, one or two winners are chosen. Since the program started
in the early 1990s, there have been three rounds of competition; the fourth
is currently under way. Each round sees about 30 applications. Some PIs
have resubmitted once, or even twice, before either being picked or giving
up. Just two missions have thrown their hats into the ring all four times:
Kepler and Vesat, a Venus orbiter.

Every time Kepler entered the contest, its science was judged first-rate,
but its technology was not. NASA's evaluation panels for the Discovery
program keep their deliberations confidential, but they do debrief the
unsuccessful applicants on what counted against them. "Every time," according
to Borucki, "NASA had a new and more ingenious reason for not accepting
Kepler." In 1994 the hurdle was cost: Discovery missions have a cost cap
that stands at $300 million. "The first time," says Borucki, "they said,
'This is a space telescope about 40 percent the size of the Hubble, which
cost $2 billion, so this is going to cost 40 percent of that; it will break
the budget cap.' After that, we got three different organizations to cost
the project, so NASA believed our figure," which was safely under the cap.

"The second time," Borucki continues, "the objection was that the CCDs
couldn't do the job. So before applying to the Discovery program again,
we went out and made measurements with the CCDs we wanted to use, published
the measurements, and showed the CCDs would work. The third time,
in 1998, they said, 'Sure, the CCDs can do that and the costs are reasonable,
but how can you show it'd all work together?'"

This time, though, the NASA judges were intrigued enough to do something
unprecedented - they didn't put Kepler on the shortlist, but they gave
it some money anyway. In fact, they gave it considerably more than they
gave the shortlisted missions for their feasibility studies. They wanted
the Ames team to build a working mock-up of the whole system and demonstrate
that it could function before returning in two years. The management at
Ames added a matching half-million dollars, and in the basement of the
Space Science Building, Borucki and a handful of colleagues started to
build their own private universe and a system with which to observe it.

The result is meant to be the technological equivalent of a lawyer's closing
argument. It's a case designed to take you through the Kepler
system from beginning to end, in a way that removes all reasonable doubts.
The argument stands about 10 feet high. It is isolated from the lab
environment
by shock absorbers on the floor and by a set of frameworks holding polystyrene
foam and aluminum plating: Each plate's temperature is controlled separately
to mimic the situation on the spacecraft. Each heating element is cooled
by a fan, held in place by an independent frame to prevent its whirring
from jostling the precisely arranged test rig. At the same time, though,
little motors inside the system impart just the amount of jiggle that would
be expected from vibrations on the craft - one of various ways of simulating
sources of "noise" that might corrupt the data. Borucki takes noise very
seriously. "It's ubiquitous," he says. "You think 'Death and taxes'? Add
noise."

The tech equivalent of a lawyer's closing argument, the test rig aims to remove all reasonable doubts. And it seems to have worked. Kepler's on NASA's shortlist.

At the bottom of the rig is a lamp that illuminates the inside of a 20-inch
white scattering sphere: not just white, says Borucki, but "perfectly white.
You couldn't see it if you looked at it." A hole in the first sphere opens
into a larger scattering sphere, an arrangement that spreads out the light
from the lamp as evenly as possible. Mounted on top of the larger sphere
is the star plate. This is the component that came from Lenox Laser: a
piece of stainless steel with tiny holes in it. The light streams through
these holes, mimicking the stars of varying brightness that Kepler
will be observing.

The holes come in many sizes. There are holes that let through the same
number of photons a second as Kepler's camera will see
from its target stars. There are smaller holes that let through less light,
just as there will be dimmer stars in Kepler's field of
view to confuse things - more noise. Some of the holes are doubled, because
some of the stars will be double stars. Optical fibers attached to some
of the holes in the plate produce a few brighter lights, which correspond
to the stars in Kepler's field of view that are bright
enough to see with the naked eye, and bright enough to pose problems to
its delicate camera - loud noise. "We're trying to make this as bad as
we can," says Borucki, "to show that no matter what goes wrong, it will
work fine." All in all, the craftspeople at Lenox drilled 1,600 stars into
the plate, according to Borucki's exacting specifications.

Forty-two of these "stars" are capable of producing "transits." Changing
the intensity of the light coming through the holes in the plate was in
some ways the hardest part of the demonstration. Controlling brightness
at a level of better than 1 part in 10,000 is a next-to-impossible task
(the state-of-the-art lamp used to illuminate the test bed is only
controllable
to about 10 times that amount). The solution turned out to be simple but
finicky. Underneath some of the holes is a very fine wire through which
a current can be passed. When the current flows through the wire it warms
the metal, which expands by a few millionths of a millimeter to block out
just enough light to simulate the passage of a planet in front of a star.

Looking down on all this is a prototype of the Kepler
camera built around a CCD chip - about 2 1/2 centimeters across and
5 centimeters long - on which there is an array of 4 million separate CCD
pixels. Each of these pixels is a tiny well in which falling photons are
converted into electrons.

Some of the 4 million pixels on the CCD will be hit by light from the pinhole
stars; these photons will knock electrons free. As more photons hit
a given pixel, more free electrons accumulate. These electrons need to
be constantly siphoned off: A pixel that fills up with electrons is of
no use, because once full - in the test rig's CCD there's room for 600,000
electrons per pixel - it can no longer measure changes in brightness. The
camera has no shutter. ("We don't want a shutter," says Borucki. "If we don't
have
a shutter, it can't get stuck.") The data is read off the chip at a megapixel
per second, and it comes off somewhat blurred: The carefully orchestrated
jitter of the test rig means that the images of the stars can move back
and forth between pixels. A little more noise is added to this data to
mimic the effects of cosmic rays penetrating the detector and sending spurious
signals, and then the data is fed into the test rig's computer. Comparisons
between "frames" are used to subtract out the blur - so the output represents
the amount of light seen by each pixel every three seconds.

Borucki says this constantly repeated sampling is where the precision needed
to spot transits comes from: "You just measure things hundreds of thousands
of times in the same way." Traces of transits are sought through constant
comparisons between the brightness of each individual star and the brightness
of the large number of similar stars in the field at that time. A transit
will show up as the dimming of one star in relation to the aggregated light
of its peers. It's much simpler to see these discrepancies than to calibrate
the dimmings according to an absolute scale of brightness. Kepler
is a Zen spacecraft, stripped of distractions and living in the moment.

This metal-and-plastic argument seems to have done its work. In January,
NASA announced that Kepler had finally reached the Discovery program's
shorter-than-usual shortlist. And its case had been bolstered outside the
lab, too, when astronomers observed transits of a very large planet orbiting
close to the star HD209458. Solar researcher Tim Brown of the High Altitude
Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, followed up these findings with the Hubble,
which showed the effect even more dramatically. When his data was presented
at the International Astronomical Union's summer 2000 meeting in Manchester,
England, it caused a genuine stir: "Really, really beautiful data," says
the Carnegie Institution's Alan Boss. The beautiful data was a simple graph
with all its points clustered close to a single line - a line level to
the left and right but with a deep, clear, flat-bottomed, symmetrical dip
in the middle. The shadow of another world.

But even if the technology looks good and the thirst for earths is growing
ever stronger, the deal may not be closed. The other two missions on the
Discovery shortlist - a spacecraft that would orbit Jupiter's poles to
look for clues to its interior structure, and a spacecraft that would study
two large and very different asteroids, Ceres and Vesta - wouldn't be there
if they didn't have a shot at the prize. The questions they address may
not be as fundamental as Kepler's, but is profundity enough to win over
the Discovery program when it makes its final selection later this year?

Left to himself, Bill Borucki would probably not be looking for planets.
He'd probably be looking for lightning. He loves lightning. When he moved
out West from Wisconsin in the 1960s, he and his wife spent their first
vacation in Arizona, watching lightning. The lightning literature, which
deals with the most extreme temperatures known on Earth, helped him in
his heat-shield research. He has simulated lightning in the lab. He has
looked for lightning on Venus (a project that first got him involved in
the details of doing photometry from a spacecraft). And he will look for
lightning on Saturn's moon, Titan, when the Huygens spacecraft
lands there in 2004.
At his home he has a small collection of fulgurites, tubes of glass formed
when lightning strikes desert sands.

But Borucki has not been left to himself. For 17 years he has been in the
company of an idea that simply will not let him go. From the moment he
met it, he's known that it was a good idea; it has offered a way to answer
a really important question, and it has needed a champion to help it realize
its potential. Talking with Borucki, I find myself expecting him to betray
a touch of resentment that the idea has dominated his life for so long
and that he has nothing to show for it. If he ever does have anything to
show for it - if Kepler makes it off the shortlist and into flight - the
results will be available only after an additional four years of development
and four years after that of taking data - each day starting with the worry
that something might go wrong. It'll be a decade he might have spent far
more enjoyably, and quite likely the last decade of his productive career.

There seems to be no trace of such resentment, though. The nearest thing
to it is the slightly mischievous glee with which Borucki speculates that
he might build the spacecraft perfectly and still not find any Earth-like
planets - for the simple reason that there aren't any there. "Imagine it,"
he beams. "An empty galaxy!"

And while the idea has been teasing Borucki along, failing to embitter
him, it has also drawn in other champions. A team based at Stanford has
tried unsuccessfully to get NASA to back missions that would use similar
technology to measure the pulsations of stars and their planetary transits.
Attempts to observe extrasolar planets crossing the face of stars - projects
which would be satisfied with a single planet - are under development in
France, Denmark, and Canada. Kepler is more ambitious than they are, however,
because it is Borucki's intention not just to use the idea, but to do it
justice. Kepler represents the best first-generation transit-observing
telescope you could make. "If you want to find Earth-like planets, that's
our niche. We don't compete with people doing other things. But we do
that superbly."

And yet, no one knows whether Kepler itself will ever
drift observantly
in and out of cones of shadow light-years long - the Discovery judges have
yet to decide.

Say they decide for Kepler, and sometime in 2005 a countdown reaches zero
and Kepler heads into the sky. Ignore for a moment the
roar of the Delta 2925-10's 10 engines. Discount the $299 million carefully
spent, which could have been spent as prudently on studying the heart of
a giant planet or puzzling out the origins of asteroids. Forget those
questions
about humanity's place in the universe, or the cosmic significance of life.
Think instead of an unremarkable-looking man in an unremarkable office,
and
of defeat after defeat. And remember the words, measured and clear:
"I know for a fact it will work. I have known that for over a decade. It's
a matter of will."